On May 23, 1933, Congressman, Louis T. McFadden,
brought formal charges against the Board of Governors
of the Federal Reserve Bank system, The Comptroller
of the Currency and the Secretary of United States
Treasury for numerous criminal acts, including but
not limited to, conspiracy, fraud, unlawful conversion,
and treason. The petition for Articles of Impeachment
was thereafter referred to the Judiciary Committee
and has yet to be acted on.

Congressman
McFadden's Speech
On the Federal Reserve Corporation

Quotations
from several speeches made on the Floor of the House
of Representatives by the Honorable Louis T. McFadden
of Pennsylvania. Mr. McFadden, due to his having served
as Chairman of the Banking and Currency Committee
for more than 10 years, was the best posted man on
these matters in America and was in a position to
speak with authority of the vast ramifications of
this gigantic private credit monopoly. As Representative
of a State which was among the first to declare its
freedom from foreign money tyrants it is fitting that
Pennsylvania, the cradle of liberty, be again given
the credit for producing a son that was not afraid
to hurl defiance in the face of the money-bund. Whereas
Mr. McFadden was elected to the high office on both
the Democratic and Republican tickets, there can be
no accusation of partisanship lodged against him.
Because these speeches are set out in full in the
Congressional Record, they carry weight that no amount
of condemnation on the part of private individuals
could hope to carry.

The
Federal Reserve - A Corrupt Institution

"Mr.
Chairman, we have in this Country one of the most
corrupt institutions the world has ever known. I refer
to the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve
Banks, hereinafter called the Fed. The Fed has cheated
the Government of these United States and the people
of the United States out of enough money to pay the
Nation's debt. The depredations and iniquities of
the Fed has cost enough money to pay the National
debt several times over.

"This
evil institution has impoverished and ruined the people
of these United States, has bankrupted itself, and
has practically bankrupted our Government. It has
done this through the defects of the law under which
it operates, through the maladministration of that
law by the Fed and through the corrupt practices of
the moneyed vultures who control it.

"Some
people who think that the Federal Reserve Banks United
States Government institutions. They are private monopolies
which prey upon the people of these United States
for the benefit of themselves and their foreign customers;
foreign and domestic speculators and swindlers; and
rich and predatory money lender. In that dark crew
of financial pirates there are those who would cut
a man's throat to get a dollar out of his pocket;
there are those who send money into states to buy
votes to control our legislatures; there are those
who maintain International propaganda for the purpose
of deceiving us into granting of new concessions which
will permit them to cover up their past misdeeds and
set again in motion their gigantic train of crime.

"These
twelve private credit monopolies were deceitfully
and disloyally foisted upon this Country by the bankers
who came here from Europe and repaid us our hospitality
by undermining our American institutions. Those bankers
took money out of this Country to finance Japan in
a war against Russia. They created a reign of terror
in Russia with our money in order to help that war
along. They instigated the separate peace between
Germany and Russia, and thus drove a wedge between
the allies in World War. They financed Trotsky's passage
from New York to Russia so that he might assist in
the destruction of the Russian Empire. They fomented
and instigated the Russian Revolution, and placed
a large fund of American dollars at Trotsky's disposal
in one of their branch banks in Sweden so that through
him Russian homes might be thoroughly broken up and
Russian children flung far and wide from their natural
protectors. They have since begun breaking up of American
homes and the dispersal of American children. "Mr.
Chairman, there should be no partisanship in matters
concerning banking and currency affairs in this Country,
and I do not speak with any.

"In
1912 the National Monetary Association, under the
chairmanship of the late Senator Nelson W. Aldrich,
made a report and presented a vicious bill called
the National Reserve Association bill. This bill is
usually spoken of as the Aldrich bill. Senator Aldrich
did not write the Aldrich bill. He was the tool, if
not the accomplice, of the European bankers who for
nearly twenty years had been scheming to set up a
central bank in this Country and who in 1912 has spent
and were continuing to spend vast sums of money to
accomplish their purpose.

"We
were opposed to the Aldrich plan for a central bank.
The men who rule the Democratic Party then promised
the people that if they were returned to power there
would be no central bank established here while they
held the reigns of government. Thirteen months later
that promise was broken, and the Wilson administration,
under the tutelage of those sinister Wall Street figures
who stood behind Colonel House, established here in
our free Country the worm-eaten monarchical institution
of the "King's Bank" to control us from the top downward,
and from the cradle to the grave.

"The
Federal Reserve Bank destroyed our old and characteristic
way of doing business. It discriminated against our
1-name commercial paper, the finest in the world,
and it set up the antiquated 2-name paper, which is
the present curse of this Country and which wrecked
every country which has ever given it scope; it fastened
down upon the Country the very tyranny from which
the framers of the Constitution sought to save us.

President Jackson's Time

"One
of the greatest battles for the preservation of this
Republic was fought out here in Jackson's time; when
the second Bank of the United States, founded on the
same false principles of those which are here exemplified
in the Fed was hurled out of existence. After that,
in 1837, the Country was warned against the dangers
that might ensue if the predatory interests after
being cast out should come back in disguise and unite
themselves to the Executive and through him acquire
control of the Government. That is what the predatory
interests did when they came back in the livery of
hypocrisy and under false pretenses obtained the passage
of the Fed.

"The
danger that the Country was warned against came upon
us and is shown in the long train of horrors attendant
upon the affairs of the traitorous and dishonest Fed.
Look around you when you leave this Chamber and you
will see evidences of it in all sides. This is an
era of misery and for the conditions that caused
that misery, the Fed are fully liable. This is an
era of financed crime and in the financing of crime
the Fed does not play the part of a disinterested
spectator.

"It
has been said that the draughtsman who was employed
to write the text of the Aldrich bill because that
had been drawn up by lawyers, by acceptance bankers
of European origin in New York. It was a copy, in
general a translation of the statues of the Reichsbank
and other European central banks. One-half million
dollars was spent on the part of the propaganda organized
by these bankers for the purpose of misleading public
opinion and giving Congress the impression that there
was an overwhelming popular demand for it and the
kind of currency that goes with it, namely, an asset
currency based on human debts and obligations. Dr.
H. Parker Willis had been employed by Wall Street
and propagandists, and when the Aldrich measure failed-
he obtained employment with Carter Glass, to assist
in drawing the banking bill for the Wilson administration.
He appropriated the text of the Aldrich bill. There
is no secret about it. The test of the Federal Reserve
Act was tainted from the first.

"A
few days before the bill came to a vote, Senator Henry
Cabot Lodge, of Massachusetts, wrote to Senator John
W. Weeks as follows:

New York
City,

December
17, 1913

"'My Dear Senator Weeks:

"'Throughout my public
life I have supported all measures designed
to take the Government out of the banking
business. This bill puts the Government into
the banking business as never before in our
history. "'The powers vested in the Federal
Reserve Board seen to me highly dangerous
especially where there is political control
of the Board. I should be sorry to hold stock
in a bank subject to such dominations. The
bill as it stands seems to me to open the
way to a vast inflation of the currency. "'I
had hoped to support this bill, but I cannot
vote for it cause it seems to me to contain
features and to rest upon principles in the
highest degree menacing to our prosperity,
to stability in business, and to the general
welfare of the people of the United States.

Very Truly
Yours,

Henry
Cabot Lodge.'"

"In
eighteen years that have passed since Senator Lodge
wrote that letter of warning all of his predictions
have come true. The Government is in the banking business
as never before. Against its will it has been made
the backer of horse thieves and card sharps, bootlegger's
smugglers, speculators, and swindlers in all parts
of the world. Through the Fed the riffraff of every
country is operating on the public credit of the United
States Government.

The
Great Depression

"Meanwhile
and on account of it, we ourselves are in the midst
of the greatest depression we have ever known. From
the Atlantic to the Pacific, our Country has been
ravaged and laid waste by the evil practices of the
Fed and the interests which control them. At no time
in our history, has the general welfare of the people
been at a lower level or the minds of the people so
full of despair.

"Recently
in one of our States, 60,000 dwelling houses and farms
were brought under the hammer in a single day. 71,000
houses and farms in Oakland County, Michigan, were
sold and their erstwhile owners dispossessed. The
people who have thus been driven out are the wastage
of the Fed. They are the victims of the Fed. Their
children are the new slaves of the auction blocks
in the revival of the institution of human slavery.

The Scheme Of The Fed

"In
1913, before the Senate Banking and Currency Committee,
Mr. Alexander Lassen made the following statement:
"The whole scheme of the Fed with its commercial paper
is an impractical, cumbersome machinery- is simply
a cover to secure the privilege of issuing money,
and to evade payment of as much tax upon circulation
as possible and then control the issue and maintain,
instead of reducing interest rates. It will prove
to the advantage of the few and the detriment of the
people. It will mean continued shortage of actual
money and further extension of credits, for when there
is a shortage of money people have to borrow to their
cost.' "A few days before the Fed passed, Senator
Root denounced the Fed as an outrage on our liberties.
He predicted: 'Long before we wake up from our dream
of prosperity through an inflated currency, our gold-
which alone could have kept us from catastrophe- will
have vanished and no rate of interest will tempt it
to return.'

"If
ever a prophecy came true, that one did.

"The
Fed became law the day before Christmas Eve, in the
year 1913, and shortly afterwards, the German International
bankers, Kuhn, Loeb and Co. sent one of their partners
here to run it.

"The
Fed Note is essentially unsound. It is the worst currency
and the most dangerous that this Country has ever
known. When the proponents of the act saw that the
Democratic doctrine would not permit them to let the
proposed banks issue the new currency as bank notes,
they should have stopped at that. They should not
have foisted that kind of currency, namely, an asset
currency, on the United States Government. They should
not have made the Government [liable on the private]
debts of individuals and corporations, and, least
of all, on the private debts of foreigners. "As Kemerer
says: 'The Fed Notes, therefore, in form, have some
of the qualities of Government paper money, but in
substance, are almost a pure asset currency possessing
a Government guarantee against which contingency the
Government has made no provision whatever.'

"Hon.
L.J.Hill, a former member of the House, said, and
truly: "They are obligations of the Government for
which the United States received nothing and for the
payment of which at any time, it assumes the responsibility:
looking to the Fed to recoup itself.'

"If
this United States is to redeem the Fed Notes, when
the General Public finds it costs to deliver this
paper to the Fed, and if the Government has made no
provisions for redeeming them, the first element of
unsoundness is not far to seek.

"Before
the Banking and Currency Committee, when the bill
was under discussion Mr. Crozier of Cincinnati said:
'The imperial power of elasticity of the public currency
is wielded exclusively by the central corporations
owned by the banks. This is a life and death power
over all local banks and all business. It can be used
to create or destroy prosperity, to ward off or cause
stringencies and panics. By making money artificially
scarce, interest rates throughout the Country can
be arbitrarily raised and the bank tax on all business
and cost of living increased for the profit of the
banks owning these regional central banks, and without
the slightest benefit to the people. The 12 Corporations
together cover y and monopolize and use for private
gain- every dollar of the public currency and all
public revenue of the United States. Not a dollar
can be put into circulation among the people by their
Government, without the consent of and on terms fixed
by these 12 private money trusts.'

"In
defiance of this and all other warnings, the proponents
of the Fed created the 12 private credit corporations
and gave them an absolute monopoly of the currency
of these United States- not of the Fed Notes alone-
but of all other currency! The Fed Act providing ways
and means by which the gold and general currency in
the hands of the American people could be obtained
by the Fed in exchange for Fed Notes- which are not
money- but mere promises to pay.

"Since
the evil day when this was done, the initial monopoly
has been extended by vicious amendments to the Fed
and by the unlawful and treasonable practices of the
Fed.